PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksSummer Snow... continues his lifelong exploration of the fiat of desire; the brutal beauty of the natural world; and song as a gnosis as profound as history or philosophy ... It is as if, having proven his mastery of the meditative lyric and its variations, Hass now wants to escape the constraints of the elegant structures he has helped to codify ... Yet the most memorable poems in the book still reside in Hass’s bailiwick: the lyric mode, in its various moods ... Poems...showcase his dexterity with vernacular, an imagistic discipline borrowed from haiku, and an instinct for the flint of narrative. Hass is also a master of the prose poem ... Hass’s forays into new territory and looser narrative structures are not always successful. When he strays too far from embodied experience, the poems fall flat ... Luckily, we have not needed Hass to be a desert prophet or proselytizer. As the Orpheus figure of his generation, one that struggled to know itself and justify its pleasures, he has had other work to do—naming desires that would otherwise remain inchoate and bewildering.
